World's largest retailer chain store opens telemedicine clinic

Saw this on Keith Kaplan’s blog: World's largest retailer chain store opens telemedicine clinic:

A Wal-Mart store (Supercenter) in Houston has opened a telemedicine-based health care delivery system.

Similar stories have broke recently about health clinics in other large retail outlets such as Target that I have posted about and some have failed within a short time.  Other traditional health care providers, such as Mayo Clinic, as I have reported, have gone off the main campus to establish outreach offices.

I think this will soon expand to the laboratory setting as well with POC and the like. Imagine getting lab results, not only serum chemistries but also reads on tissue and body fluids when you are seen without waiting and see this a future market for laboratories.  Specimens collected and prepared at time of visit can be viewed with telepathology, without travel to central laboratory collection facilities or waiting for results.

Pretty interesting.  Of course Keith works for Mayo, so you know this is being discussed there…  imagine every Walmart has a ScanScope for feeding digital slides to Mayo, for diagnosis… some kind of nurse practitioner on-site is the source of the biopsies, and prepares the slides…  is that farfetched?  Probably.  Still you never know…

Comments

[Telemedicine]

Check out the video on the offsite care website. It is a compelling example of how rural hospitals can utilize robotic telemedicine to deliver intesnsivist services to patients in the ICU.